Even though Herbert Schuch and Gülru Ensari only started playing together as a duo from the 2014/15 season on, this German-Turkish piano twosome has already delivered convincing performances – both four-handed at one piano and on two pianos – at many international venues, including the BOZAR in Brussels, the Philharmonie in Cologne, in Munich, Salzburg, at the MiTo Festival in Milan and Turin and at the Istanbul Music Festival. In the 2017/18 season, they are to make their duo debuts with orchestras such as the WDR Symphony Orchestra and the Hessian State Orchestra Wiesbaden, and at the Kissinger Sommer festival, in Luxembourg and in Frankfurt, among other venues.

At the start of 2017, the duo’s critically-acclaimed first CD recording was issued on the label Avi Music. At its centre is Stravinsky’s fiery – and once-scandalous – ballet music, “The Rite of Spring”, flanked by waltzes of Hindemith and Brahms. The première recording of two Anatolian folk songs by the Turkish composer Özkan Manav rounds out the programme, which, in its fascinating combination of pieces from West and East, also reflects the private background of these two musicians: Herbert Schuch and Gülru Ensari married in Istanbul in the summer of 2014 and have been living for some years in their adopted home city of Cologne.